[QGIS-Developer] Windows only version of a QGIS 2.18x plugin

Wed Feb 6 08:28:52 PST 2019

The problem with metadata is that if you use it, you have no way to easily know if something (a  group of plugins) uses a platform-specific plugin.

For example, in ubuntu, I can choose:

-          Official  (secure)

-          Universe (insecure/half-legal)

-          Partner (copyrighted/patented)

-          and of course custom repos

So if somebody or some tutorial tells me to add the « universe » repo, I know instantly not to do that on a server or in a security-critical situation.

If it instead would tell me to install package x, which then installs 20 other packages, which then each install more packages – how do I even filter that information if I have per-package metadata ?  I wouldn’t even use metadata for that, because something might run on Linux, but not on your specific version, for example ARM processor on Linux Chromebook. You’ll have to subdivide by processor for binaries.  Plugins can depend on other plugins.

It might be even better to have 5 repositories:
All-platforms, Windows-only, Linux-Only, Mac-Only, Rest-of-the-world
So if your plugin works on Windows and Linux, you just upload it to the 2 repositories, and finished.

If somebody then tells me to add a „windows only“ plugin, I know to steer clear of that shit if I use Linux, and vice-versa.
And that without having to lookup metadata.

Von: C Hamilton [mailto:adenaculture at gmail.com]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2019 17:02
An: Stefan Steiger <Steiger at cor-management.ch>
Cc: Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com>; Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>; qgis-dev <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Betreff: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Windows only version of a QGIS 2.18x plugin

I have been following this interesting discussion and thought I would make a couple of comments. I understand the different views people have. Ideally it would be nice for all plugins to work on all platforms, but I can see the benefit from certain plugins accessing external libraries that are not available on all platforms. I have considered doing this myself in accessing some of the excellent astronomical packages on Windows, but have been concerned that I could no post the plugin in the official repo. Yes you can set up a separate repo, but it makes it very difficult for the plugin to be found and it would not be worth it to me to put in the effort to have it not be officially recognized and be discoverable.

I personally think it is important that there be some mechanism for people to publish plugins that have platform dependencies. Ideally, they would first try to find alternative solutions before making the decision to link to platform specific resources, but some very important capabilities will require this. I wouldn't want to discourage developers by insisting that all plugins must work on all platforms.

I am not sure that having two separate repositories is the best approach either. I don't think that a separate repo should be classified as 'dirty', etc. I would think that this could be addressed by the metadata associated with the plugin.

Calvin

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 10:36 AM Stefan Steiger <Steiger at cor-management.ch<mailto:Steiger at cor-management.ch>> wrote:

Is it not possible to create two official repositories ?
One for "all-platforms", one for "dirty/fishy/phony/dubious/in-progress"

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: QGIS-Developer [mailto:qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>] Im Auftrag von Martin Dobias
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2019 15:50
An: Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it<mailto:cavallini at faunalia.it>>
Cc: qgis-dev <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>>
Betreff: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Windows only version of a QGIS 2.18x plugin

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 12:04 PM Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it<mailto:cavallini at faunalia.it>> wrote:
>
> On 06/02/19 09:42, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
>
> > If you prefer to put it in QGIS repo: just add a big note in the
> > metadata.txt description that this plugin is only usable with vesper
> > and windows. And maybe do an OS check in the __init__ for illiterate
> > users ;-)
>
> I respectfully disagree with that: at the very core of the QGIS
> project it stands the idea of letting everybody use the best possible
> GIS, without discrimination. This kind of approach would in fact
> favour Windows users.

My preference would be to keep the official QGIS plugin repo more open and allow plugins that do not support all QGIS platforms. Often there are useful tools that are only available for one platform and plugin author does not have power to change that. But we should not make life of users on the supported platform more complicated just because other platforms cannot be supported.

As it was suggested already, if there would be a larger amount of plugins that are not multi-platform, we could have a piece of metadata so that users on other platforms could be warned.

For example, Crayfish plugin for QGIS 2.x did not support macOS - it was a known limitation and it would be sad if the plugin would be rejected from the official QGIS plugin repo just because of that.

Cheers
Martin
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